Identifying your target audience for your business website is a time-consuming process. You may need to segment them into different demographics to come up with a highly-targeted set of people to market to.
As difficult as it sounds, market research is the least of your problems. What you will ultimately worry about is how to attract them to your site and how to keep them there.
Assuming that the competition in your niche is tight, every factor in your website matters. People are most likely leaving your site because there are factors that you overlooked and is giving your visitors a difficult user experience. Below are some of the issues that you may need to address and how you can fix them.
It loads slowly
The first thing that visitors will notice is the loading speed of your site. Users have short attention spans, so you want your site to load as fast as possible. If your site loads longer than four seconds, as one study points out, you can expect a quarter of your incoming visitors to leave your page.
There are lots of variables involved in a slow loading site. Instead of identifying each one of them, follow this guide instead to help you identify and solve the issue yourself or with your developer. While the guide caters to WordPress owners, it is nonetheless applicable to any website.
A crucial factor that influences site speed is your web host of choice. You should never settle on cheap web hosting providers that suffer from tons of downtime and use unreliable hardware to run your site. Always choose high-end WordPress hosting providers to ensure that your site runs in tip-top shape.
It has terrible design
Once your site loads, the design, and layout take center stage. If your site looks like it was built on Geocities from the late ‘90s, then you’re clearly out of touch with your audience. You may want to brush up on the best web design practices to ensure that your site design is up to date and resonates with what’s expected from you by visitors.
Also, your web design will confuse people if it doesn’t comply with your branding. It should have consistent colors, font face, and must boast the same quality and presentation as seen from your other marketing collaterals.
Doing so allows you to adhere to a uniform appearance for your business, thus creating a good impression to your audience with your branding.
It has lots of choices
Having many options to choose on your website may sound like a good thing. Ideally, the choices allow them to find one that suits their needs and not settle on a broader option.
However, having lots of choices paralyzes people from making a decision. In fact, having fewer options according to Sheena Iyengar’s TED talk can help your visitors make the right choice. By simplifying the process of choosing, you can increase engagement with your customer.
About your website, you may want to limit the choices, so visitors will not be overwhelmed by different options. In fact, you want to focus on a single call to action for each page on your site. Creating a hyper-focused landing page that is dedicated to getting visitors to perform a single action on your page allows you to boost site retention and decrease bounce rate.
It has crappy content
The content is the foundation where your business site rests on. Therefore, if your copy reads like a generic and templated message, then you definitely won’t convince anybody to sign up for your products or services. Also, the use of stock images has been beaten to death – you need to take a refreshing approach to your visual content strategy so you can effectively communicate your ideas better.
By crafting well-written and compelling copy, as well as high-resolution and compressed images and videos, you can attract even the most doubtful of your audience into becoming customers or clients.
Conclusion
As a business owner, you cannot blame your audience for making a snap judgment and leaving your website. Doing so will prevent you from even making a sale and push you out of business.
Therefore, you need to bend to the will of your audience and give them a reason why they should support your business. By following the advice mentioned above, you can get them to stay on your site and give you a fair shake with them.
Originally posted on June 16, 2017 @ 8:24 pm